Feds back away from buying sensitive
land

EVERGREEN, Colorado — On a cold,
foggy day in late March, not much is visible of the 6,000-acre
Beaver Brook watershed in the mountains near Evergreen, Colo. Tall
spruce and fir trees, flocked with snow, vanish into the low-lying
clouds within 20 yards. A foot of snow blankets a meadow traced by
elk and coyote tracks.

It’s the kind of landscape
that gets subdivided into "prime mountain estates," and last fall,
a big chunk of the property faced that fate. The nearby city of
Golden had acquired Beaver Brook in the 1920s as a water supply,
but by the late ’90s, the booming town needed more water and
put the land up for sale to fund a new reservoir.

In
2001, the Mountain Area Land Trust, an Evergreen-based land
preservation nonprofit, arranged for the Arapaho National Forest to
buy Beaver Brook — which adjoins the forest — for $21.1
million. The Forest Service planned to use federal Land and Water
Conservation Fund dollars to buy a portion of the land every year,
completing the purchase in 2005.

As of this March,
Congress had come up with a total of $15.5 million, enough to buy
three-quarters of the property. But the remaining $5.6 million
wasn’t forthcoming, and the Forest Service’s purchase
option was about to expire. "We wanted to keep that land as open
space," says Chuck Baroch, Golden’s mayor, "but if that
didn’t materialize, we would consider selling to developers."

Baroch’s dilemma is emblematic of the struggle
facing communities and conservation groups around the West, as they
compete with developers over the fate of sensitive lands. In the
last year or two, that struggle has become even harder, as the
federal government starts to turn away from the time-honored idea
of buying land in order to preserve it.

A $10
billion backlog

Back in 1964, Congress created the Land
and Water Conservation Fund to allow both federal and state
governments to purchase natural areas and develop parks, soccer
fields and picnic grounds.

The Fund has paid for about
40,000 outdoor recreation projects and protected some 7 million
acres of parks, open space and refuges, in places ranging from
Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona to Utah’s Flaming Gorge
National Recreation Area to the Platte River park in downtown
Denver, Colo.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund is
supposed to get most of its money from fees paid by companies
drilling for offshore oil and gas. But "Congress consistently
diverts those funds," says Tom St. Hilaire, executive director of
Americans for our Heritage and Recreation, a national coalition
that educates the public about the Land and Water Conservation
Fund. "(The Fund) never gets what it’s supposed to" —
the $900 million of annual funding that Congress authorized in
1977.

Funds for federal land acquisition were slashed
from $445 million in 2001 to $177 million in 2004, and in 2005,
took another $13 million hit. Under President Bush’s 2006
budget, state funding would disappear completely, while dollars for
federal land purchases would drop to $146 million, the lowest level
in a decade. "Now is the worst time, given our challenges from
sprawling development, to be cutting back on the Fund," says
Christine Fanning, communications director of the nonprofit
Conservation Fund.

The National Park Service estimates
that in 2004, unmet state and local recreation needs, such as city
parks and baseball diamonds, were close to a billion dollars. And
the backlog for buying new land for wildlife refuges, national
parks and national forests now sits at more than $10 billion,
according to St. Hilaire.

Last year, Oregon’s
Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area requested $5.5 million from the
Land and Water Conservation Fund to purchase properties in danger
of being logged or developed. Congress gave it just $1 million,
says Mike Ferris, Forest Service spokesman: "We’re losing out
on the ability to protect critical pieces of land."

No more new federal lands?

The lack of
attention to the Land and Water Conservation Fund parallels a
growing movement within the federal government to reduce its role
in land stewardship. The Interior Department recently released a
report outlining its goals for land conservation, which stated that
acquiring land is only one tool among many for protecting it. The
report stresses "cooperative conservation" — giving private
landowners grants to conserve land while retaining ownership of it.

And some Western members of Congress have stepped up
their efforts to prevent new land purchases, and are even trying to
sell off chunks of federal land. Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah,
introduced a bill in early March that would require the federal
government to inventory its holdings and identify properties that
could be sold or turned over to local governments. Also in March,
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., introduced a "No Net Loss of Private
Land" bill, which would prevent the Departments of Agriculture and
Interior from increasing the public-land estate in the West.

This lack of federal support means that conservationists
bent on saving land will have to get creative — and
that’s what has happened with the Beaver Brook watershed.
Although the cuts to the Land and Water Conservation Fund prevented
the Forest Service from buying the remaining 1,400 acres of the
watershed, the Mountain Area Land Trust stepped in with $150,000.
The trust then got Clear Creek County to pitch in another $390,000,
and convinced Great Outdoors Colorado, a lottery-supported grant
program for open space and parks, to loan the county the $5.2
million balance until the Forest Service can get the money
appropriated.

But other communities may not be so lucky
in piecing together the support they need for open-space
protection. "We look at it from the perspective of willing
landowners who’d like to sell," says St. Hilaire.
"They’re not going to wait forever for a government agency to
come up with the money."

The author is
HCN’s news editor.

CONTACTS:

The Conservation
Fund Christine Fanning, 703-908-5809

Americans for our Heritage and Recreation Tom
St. Hilaire, 202-454-3370